Reckless Eyes

“Hey, copper, take a look,” says Woody Woodpecker to Wally Walrus, who just happens to be in mid-air after Woody’s makeshift airplane bammed into Wally’s door. Wally nods his head—then realises where he is. Here’s the take.



I will bet you the multiple eyes are courtesy of Don Williams, who made the same kind of drawings when he moved over to Warner Bros. from Lantz.

This is from the 1946 cartoon, The Reckless Driver, which gives animation credit on screen to Les Kline and Grim Natwick.

Crazy, Darn Fool Duck

When Daffy Duck first appeared in Tex Avery’s Porky's Duck Hunt in 1937, he was silly but wily. But when Bob Clampett used the character, at least for the first little while, he was just mentally out of it. Clampett loved cross-eyed crazy characters, and that’s what Daffy became.

Here’s an example from Porky’s Last Stand (1940). Daffy is drying dishes with his butt. He then tosses them into the air and they come crashing down on him. He doesn’t care. He’s unbalanced.



Fortunately, Daffy soon acquired some depth as a character. By the end of the ‘40s, he was more like Avery’s duck, but with some wit and a little less batty. Then the ‘50s rolled around and he was turned into a jealous, incompetent foil. Oh, well.

As for this cartoon, Izzy Ellis is the credited animator. I imagine Norm McCabe, Vive Risto and John Carey worked on it as well.

Buddies With Bilko

What was it like on the set of the old Bilko show? Thanks to a frustrated actor, we have an idea.

Herb Kamm (far right) was a newspaperman for the New York World Telegram. But he wanted to do more than write. He wanted to act. And Phil Silvers gave him an opportunity.

Here’s his story published in the TV Radio Mirror of January 1959. This was Bilko’s last season.

I Was "Drafted" Into Bilko's Army
Writer turned actor — for two whole days of shooting — know now why Phil Silvers' men willingly follow their sergeant in his zany battles
By HERBERT KAMM
AT LONG LAST, I have inflicted revenge on the myopic grade-school teacher who once told me I couldn't act and the draft officer who cavalierly rejected me for service in the Army of the United States. In a single masterful stroke, some weeks ago, I became an actor and a soldier, filling both roles under the greatest military figure of our electronic time, Sergeant Ernie Bilko.
The failure of the theatrical and military worlds to recognize my supreme talents had rankled in my breast for years. Being a writer is a rewarding enough profession, but it has never nourished the hunger for power— the power of spellbinding an audience, of being a fighting man.
Unable to endure the privation any longer, I took matters into my own hands, one bright day, and confessed my frustration to Phil Silvers. "Write me into one of the scripts of the Bilko television series," I pleaded. "I will be able to triple in brass as an actor, soldier and writer. More, I will be able to go out and tell the world of the behind-the-scenes magic of your show."
It was that last statement that made his eyebrows arch over the horizon of his glasses. "A capital idea!" he cried.
The script writers of The Phil Silvers Show, "You'll Never Get Rich," were hastily summoned and told of the conspiracy. It just so happened that the script for Program No. 113 — the show is now in its fourth straight year — was being completed. Titled "Bilko, the Potato Sack King," the installment contained several parts which had not yet been filled. One was the role of an Army recruit who would appear in one scene and utter fourteen deathless, uninterrupted words. This was me.
I filled out a three-page contract in triplicate with the Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., a federal withholding-tax form and a New York State non-resident tax form. I was in.
Two teams of two writers each are assigned to the Silvers show. Each tandem turns in a script of some sixty pages on alternate weeks. While one team actually is writing, the other is sweating out an idea. It's hard work.
Once the script is completed, it takes five days to get the filmed portrayal of it "in the can," as we actors say, for showing on television at a later date. The first day is devoted merely to a reading of the lines against a stopwatch.
Silvers, producer Ed Montagne, director Aaron Ruben and the other members of the company obviously were confident of my ability and my dedication to show-must-go-on tradition, for they excused me from attending the reading.
The following day, at one P.M. sharp, I reported to rehearsal on the sixth floor of Steinway Hall in midtown Manhattan. The rehearsal studio is a large room with a stage at one end; the other walls are rimmed with ballet bars. Except for a few chairs and tables, no props are used in the run-throughs.
The script girl, Gertrude Black, pointed to my line on Page 29 and smiled benignly. Other members of the cast, whom I readily recognized as the assorted heroes of Sergeant Bilko's platoon, were scattered about the room, chatting, reading newspapers or staring off into space.
Paul Ford, who plays Bilko's commanding officer. Colonel Hall, sat off in a corner mouthing his lines. In contrast with most of the others, who wore sport clothes, he was dressed in a business suit. After all, he's a colonel. Silvers, wearing a brown suit, a striped sports shirt buttoned at the neck and a gray hat shoved back on his head, sat reading his script listlessly.
Silvers called me over and patted my knee. "You'll have to forgive me," he said. "I'm not myself today. I've had some kind of a bug for the last couple of days."
"You look pretty good to me, Sarge," I said. I had been "drafted" only two days, but it doesn't take a soldier long to recognize authority, by golly.



Maurice Gosfield, the squat, screw-faced pixie who plays Doberman, wandered over to pay his respects. "I lost fourteen pounds," he said, holding his trousers away from his midriff. "Look, you could put a baby kangaroo in there. Clean living is what does it."
"You look more like you got caught in a revolving door," said Silvers. That took care of Private Doberman.
The scenes of the show are not rehearsed in regular sequence, so it was some time before Silvers and I — get that, Silvers and I — were called by director Ruben. Formerly a writer for the show, Ruben has been its director the last two years.
"Directing is wonderful," he told me. "It's taught me more about this business in a couple of years than I could learn in maybe fifty years of writing. But it's still the script that counts. If you haven't got the words, you're dead."
My scene finds Bilko being re-issued to the Army after a brief and disastrous foray into the business world as the $20,000-a-year executive of a firm manufacturing burlap potato sacks. As he is being handed his new gear, I march in with five other recruits to receive mine. Awed by the pile of clothing handed me, I exclaim: "Wow, I never had so many clothes in my life — two hundred dollars' worth!"
Maybe Shakespeare did write better stuff, but he could hardly top that line, and I must say I delivered it with convincing gusto. Having said, I looked up at Silvers for approval.
He peered down at me and smirked, "All right, now get the hell out of here."
"Hey, that's not in the script," I protested.
"If you're not careful, you won't be, either," he barked.
Under the ministrations of Ruben, we went through the scene several times. It got better each time, thanks to Silvers. Bug or no bug, he quickly warmed up to the flavor of the scene, lifting the spirits of the other players as he did.
"The guy is so terrific," Ruben said later, "that we never stop running the cameras when we shoot his scenes, because you never know when he's going to throw in something priceless — an extra word, an extra gesture."
It is worth mentioning, too, that Silvers pretty much knows his lines after a single reading. He is quickly transformed from Phil Silvers to Ernie Bilko.
The second day's rehearsal was much like the first, except that more action was thrown into it. It was apparent, too, that the pressure and tension of acting had begun to set in. But Silvers, though still a bit under the weather, was alive with animation and good humor and drew laughter frequently to ease the strain.
"You never get tired of this guy," said Harvey Lembeck, who plays Rocco. "Everything he ever learned in show business is put into his work here. He's terrific, and you can't help but do well, working with him. That's why this cast has stuck together so long. You won't find a happier bunch in the business."
Thus inspired, I went home to study my line and to act it out in front of a mirror. The youngest of my three sons caught me at it and ran crying to his mother. She put him to bed with a sedative, but even now he avoids me.



Thursday was my big day. The filming is done in CBS Studio A. It's a large building in a rather dingy neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side, but it was on this same site that Adolph Zukor started his Famous Players long before the advent of talkies. The schedule called for shooting to start at nine A.M., but, after a fitful night, I arrived fifteen minutes early.
The floor was cluttered with sets, cameras, actors, technicians and a score of other supernumeraries, but it was orderly confusion. Ruben and Al DeCaprio, camera director, supervised the arranging of props and worked out camera positions, marking them on the floor with masking tape.
Here again, the scenes were not taken in sequence, and mine was the second on the roster. I spent the preliminary time looking over my set — an Army supply room with a counter and eight steel shelves on which were piled canteens, mess kits, ammo belts, shirts, pants, sweaters, coats and helmets. A sign on the wall read- "No Alterations. If It Don't Fit MAKE IT!" Truly inspiring, I thought.
Suddenly we were called into action. My finest hour had come.
I had been told to wear casual clothes — "Remember, you're being inducted into the Army, not the Chase National Bank" — but it was a keen disappointment when the makeup man passed me by. "Can't do much with that kisser," he said.
We walked through the action twice, and then came the heart-palpitating command: "All right, everybody, this is a take. Quiet! Quiet on the floor! Cameras ready? Okay, roll it!"
As I marched in behind another recruit, my mouth went dry, and my Adam's apple played tennis with my ears. But, when my cue came, I uttered my fourteen words loud and clear. I was nothing less than superb.
Still, the standards of the people who turn out the Silvers show are such that they never settle for anything less than perfection. So the scene was filmed three times before Messrs. Ruben and DeCaprio, obviously unworried over the chances of my suffering a heart attack, were satisfied with it. But I must admit: We were better each time.
When it was over, Ruben gave me the double-O sign, and Silvers pinched my cheek. "See?" he said, turning to the others. "Everybody was worried about this guy's line. "This guy said his line better than anybody."
The flattery drooled over me like honey over a bun.
"You'd be surprised," Silvers said seriously, "at how many times an actor with one line will fluff it. Sometimes they just freeze up."
Later he told me: "Let's face it. This is work I love it, but it's work. People watch the show and say, 'That must be easy. Everybody has a ball.' Well, we do have a ball, but no matter how long you're in the business, you feel the tension, and you always wonder if maybe you couldn't have made it a little better."
I came away from the experience with a profound respect for every person who had even the smallest part in it. There was not a single untoward incident; only a complete dedication on the part of everyone, from script girl to star — that, and a feeling of deep pride.
Sure, it was a lark for me. And, when I viewed the edited film at a private showing, my ego went into orbit. My wife now treats me with a respect commensurate with my new stature as an actor; the stigma of having been classified 4-F during World War II has been expunged, and I've got a thing or two to tell that grade-school teacher.
But, more than anything else, I've acquired fresh esteem for television and the people who labor in its tangled, cabled vineyards.

I've Seen This Before

Director Mike Lah borrows the try-to-break-down-door joke from The Three Little Pups (1953) for his cartoon Blackboard Jumble (1956).



It appears he borrowed more than just the gag.



It’s a shame Lah didn’t borrow some of the stronger gags from Avery’s original.

Billy Boy Backgrounds

The 1950s brought different ways of drawing characters and settings in animated cartoons, and the major theatrical studios and commercial houses started stylising their art.

For years, Tex Avery’s background artist was Johnny Johnsen, who went with him from Warner Bros. to MGM. His style was very traditional, quite different than what you find in Avery’s Billy Boy, released in 1954.



By the way, if you look closely, you’ll notice the day/night shots of the farm are not the same. Same with the day/night artwork of the railway tracks.



The style—note the flat table against the wall—is very similar to what you’d find in some of the early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons.



So was Johnson responsible for these, merely following Ed Benedict’s layouts? Johnson painted the backgrounds for Drag-a-long Droopy (Prod. 271), the cartoon which went into production immediately before this one. But neither Billy Boy (Prod. 272) nor Avery’s next cartoon, TV of Tomorrow (Prod. 274), have a background artist credit. Johnsen worked on the next cartoon, Homesteader Droopy (Prod. 276), but then Joe Montell’s name shows up on the next Avery production, the stylised Farm of Tomorrow (Prod. 278).

Is it possible Montell was at the studio and worked uncredited? Could it be Vera Ohman, whose name starts appearing around this time? Or was it someone else never credited at MGM? It’s hard to say, but my bet is that Montell is responsible for the backgrounds in this cartoon. He later moved on to the John Sutherland studio, then went to Hanna-Barbera before moving to Mexico to work on cartoons for Jay Ward Productions.

Answering the Phone on the Radio

A wonderful cast of secondary players populated the Jack Benny radio show, ones who weren’t part of the opening credits. In the post-war years, Mel Blanc was at the top of the list. Jack loved his work so much that Mel would be referred to be name in a number of the shows and he pretty much appeared every week for the last several years.

A few of them, besides Blanc, had several roles on the show, and they included Bea Benaderet and Sara Berner. They became telephone operators at the start of the 1945-46 season. Benaderet stayed until the end, Berner was replaced by Shirley Mitchell in early 1953 in what TV Guide said was a dispute over money.

Their characters moved from NBC to CBS along with the radio show. I don’t recall a reference on the show to their move, though there were some jokes about Bill Paley inducing all kinds of people to switch networks.

Radio Life wrote about them in its issue of November 9, 1947. It doesn’t really say all that much, other than give a few radio credits.

Introducing the Two Very Adept Actresses Who Are Jack's "Number Plee-yuz" Problem
By Judy Maguire
(BUZZERS LOUD, AS IN A SWITCHBOARD)
Bea: Oh, Mabel.
Sara: What is it, Gertrude?
Bea: Your outside line is flashing.
Sara: You get it, will you?
Bea: Okay. (SOUND, CLICK OF PLUG). National Broadcasting Company. Oh, hello. What? Just a minute, I'll connect you. (SOUND, CLICK OF PLUG). Oh, Mabel, it's Mr. Benny.
Sara: I wonder what Spam-face wants now.
Rea: He wants me to connect him with the mimeograph department, because they haven’t delivered his scripts yet.
Sara: Scripts? Well, how do you like that? And he palms himself off as an ad-lib comedian.
Rea: Yeah. He couldn't ad-lib a click if he had false teeth.
Sara: Ain't it the truth.
Bea: But I don't care if he can ad-lib or not. I think he's cute.
Sara: Why should you think he's cute? He's gone out with me more times than he has with you.
Bea: He has not.
Sara: He has too.
Bea: Oh Mabel, let's not argue. When we look like we do we should be happy we've got each other.
Brooklynesing this dialogue for the past three seasons as the sassy PBXers who make Jack Benny's life an open book are two of radio's most adroit character experts. Bea Benaderet, who's "Gertrude Gearshift," and Sara Berner, who's "Mabel Flapsaddle," started as a one-time-only comedy spot with Jack, have been on the show ever since.
Neither of them, incidentally, could operate a switchboard if she tried. NBC knows, because the girls did try, when they took over the station's Hollywood board for some publicity pictures. Bea was pregnant at the time. Photographers, regular operators and press agents had to work around her. In the confusion, cords flew, dialers yelped, ousted "help" tried to save what calls they could, Sara and Bea wailed "What'll we do now?" and one important coast-to-coast executive cooled his heels on a call for a fine ten minutes.
The place has never been the same since, declares NBC's head operator, Billie Clevenger, who is nonetheless the girls' most loyal fan. Coincidentally, another Gertrude (Smith) regularly works the Hollywood Vine and Sunset board right next to Billie.
Not Likes
But, while they're identically gum-popping, short-skirted and flip-commented on the program, Bea and Sara could hardly be paired as like types away from the studio.
Bea, who has just had her hair pouf-cut and dyed a soft feathery red (from its previous long page-boy black) is a swinging, adjusted soul who effects a "gosh, don't mind me" congeniality. She is the very happy wife of Jim Bannon, announcer and actor, and the mother of seven-year-old Jack and five-month-old Maggie. Professionally, she is: "Eve Goodwin" on the "Great Gildersleeve" show; "Mrs. Anderson," henpecker of Dink Trout, on the Dennis Day show; "Mrs. Carstairs" on "Fibber and Molly"; and "Gloria" on "Ozzie and Harriet", as well as one of Benny's switchboard sweeties. She's more interested in her family, she admits, than anything else.
Whereas, little, quiet, big-brown-eyed Sara Berner, by contrast, is absorbed in her career of mimicry. "Sara's a real ham," says Bea with affection. And gentle, soft-voiced Sara will indeed exert any effort to achieve an impersonation of character which has intrigued her.
"I've often wanted to be a telephone operator," she offers with enthusiasm, "so I could listen to all those wonderful people who call in!" Sara spent four years in vaudeville with her "impressions" and traveled the country during the war with them. She's "Little Jasper" on the "Puppetoons." She's the animated mouse who said "Lookit me, I'm dancin' " in "Anchors Aweigh.' She was one of the two talking camels on "The Road to Morocco." And you ought to hear her get going on her take-offs of Edna Mae Oliver, Bette Davis, Mrs. Roosevelt, Una Merkel, Fannie Brice, Gracie Allen! On the air, she plays both Ida and daughter Marilyn Cantor; a complete assortment of colored characters for "Amos 'n' Andy"; Jack Benny's girlfriend "Gladys Zybisco" (in addition to switchboarder "Mabel") ; dramatics and dialects on call.
Sara, who went with the Benny troupe on its tour to Canada, knows a story of the trip that few have heard. On the way out of Corvallis, Oregon, the plane (a giant DC-3) hit a thunderhead, went up 2000 feet, down 2000 feet and finally the pilot turned the ship back.
When they landed again in Corvallis, the entire company piled shiveringly into the town's hotel. "And there in the lobby," relates Sara, "were a whole lot of people sitting around an old radio listening !o the Jack Benny rebroadcast. You can imagine what happened when Jack himself walked in. Nothing in the place was too good for him!
"We all crowded into Jack's room then ... the cast, WAC's and generals from the nearby army camp and folks from all over the town ... for a big party that lasted all night. Wonderful ad-libs! Phil said to Rochester, 'Boy, you look like a bottle of Adohr Milk,' and Roch said, 'Me? No mo' airplane rides fo' me, I'm goin' home by ox.' We blamed the plane trouble on Don . . . he'd just dropped off to sleep in the ship's tail.
"What a night! What a party!" enthuses the little veteran actress who loves every inch of her career. "It was just like being born again!"

Bea Benadaret appeared regularly on television until cancer spread; she died in 1968. Sara Berner did not. She had personal and health issues that made her appearances a rarity; she passed away in 1969.

He Can't See, But He Can Sell

For years, there have been gag presidential campaigns. Gracie Allen mounted one. So did Pat Paulsen. And Huckleberry Hound. So did someone else with the goal being something other than the White House—Mr. Magoo.

Ad agency BBDO took the 1960 election campaign and used metaphors to sell General Electric light bulbs, building it around Mr. Magoo. It would seem like an odd choice, given that light bulbs wouldn’t make the almost-blind Magoo see any better. But Magoo was an incredibly popular character through the ‘50s, winning two Oscars, and 1960 was a good year for him, too. Hank Saperstein had wrested control of the UPA cartoon studio from Stephen Bosustow and was about to flood television with brand-new, made-for-TV Magoo cartoons, after a deal for a half-hour show sponsored by Kellogg’s fell through. The less said about the TV cartoons, the better. But thanks mostly to Jim Backus’ enthusiastic voice work, Magoo was not only popular, he was better known to people than than giant corporation General Electric.

Magoo had proven to be a good salesman, too, appearing on beer commercials in the 1950s. Here’s how Broadcasting magazine of August 15, 1960 describes his job at G-E.

General Electric bets a million on Magoo to win
A million dollar's worth of tv time will be thrown behind the autumn campaign on behalf of General Electric's favorite candidate — Mr. Magoo, animated spokesman for GE's light bulbs.
The largest block of time yet bought will carry the Magoo message to the precincts through 269 tv stations in 129 markets. A total of 14,000 spot tv commercials will be sponsored over a four-week period starting Sept. 19.
One-minute announcements, 20-second spots and IDs will present the cartoon character as he solicits votes for GE's lamp division. The Magoo platform — "The soft-white bulb for better light."
The little fellow with the genial visage and the worst case of near-sightedness on the air will shake hands with water-pump handles and smooch babies in his "Ballot For Bulbs" campaign. In a typical 20-second commercial he quips, to a poodle in a woman's arms, "It's easy to see whose baby you are" and enters a police station in the belief it's a fine place for a campaign speech.

Salesman Magoo ■ After Mister Magoo had been given a test run last spring, Marty King, advertising manager of the GE lamp division, described the campaign as "the best tie-in and sales-getter General Electric has used in its advertising history."
The spring test was based on a three-week campaign of 20-second IDs in Fort Wayne, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. GE's agency, BBDO New York, had suggested Mister Magoo as the company searched for a livelier message than had been used in its extensive network radio and tv campaigns. Tv particularly, it was felt, needed a more exciting vehicle.

GE figured it should be able to build up sales through saturation spots, perhaps in the Lestoil manner. It already had a distribution and permanent merchandising system.
After the three-city test, Mister Magoo was given point-of-purchase displays tieing-in with commercials appearing in a 125-market saturation run that lasted three weeks. From now on Mister Magoo will be featured in spring and autumn tv schedules backed by "push-through merchandising on top of good advertising."
The spring testing was checked by Schrewin Research. The verdict: good company recognition. In a sampling made later during the actual placement of Magoo commercials (using a 2,000-phone call sample and a check that included 375 stores), recognition of Mister Magoo scored in one-half of those interviewed, while GE earned a 35% recognition.
According to Mr. King, part of the GE bulb success came from a realization simply that "selling bulbs was like selling Jello, a Revlon lipstick or a Lestoil. What we needed to instill was 'local excitement'." And that's the tenor of Magoo selling.

Female Audience ■ Since 70% of the electric bulb market is traced to women purchasers, most of the "Ballot for Bulbs" campaign will be minutes placed near daytime programs. But last spring GE found that though dealers heard about Mister Magoo, they hadn't seen him. This will be rectified in the fall with some 20s and IDs in prime evening time.
In this energetic GE push which will aim toward the traditional bulb outlets of drug, variety, hardware and food stores, dealer contests will be held along with establishment of tie-in displays.
Already there's been a bit of fun that GE hadn't planned on. During the Democratic convention last month CBS-TV cameras picked up a demonstration for Adlai Stevenson. In the background but flying high waved a "Magoo for President" banner. Westinghouse Electric, a director competitor of GE's, sponsored the CBS coverage.
GE contrives carefully for attention. At a Battle Creek, Mich., store (CutRate market) last spring a direct tie-up with the Magoo commercial campaign included a 40-foot GE bulb display set up along one whole wall. In the three-week tv campaign the store sold $4,000 worth of bulbs, or 25% of its annual bulb volume.
The Magoo commercial concept is the creation of Art Bellaire, vice president and associate copy director in charge of tv and radio at BBDO. who conceived the idea of making a salesman out of the familiar UPA animated character. Dick Mercer, vice president and creative group supervisor at the agency, and Mr. Bellaire have written the commercials. UPA Pictures produces the films with other credits going to Bill Fuess of UPA and Eddie Dillon, an art director at BBDO.
Mister Magoo, an effective means of personalizing the soft-white bulb featured by GE, has his larynx flexed and his hair trimmed for what may be one of the brighter spots of the fall political maneuvering. GE's counting on him to sell its bulbs.

Mickey Plays Mickey

Draw some circles and you have Mickey Mouse. Well, you have the Mickey Mouse of 1929, the one who played animals as musical instruments and cavorted around cuspidors and outhouses, back when synchronising sound was enough of a novelty to capture the audience’s attention.

In Mickey’s Follies (1929), Mickey plays sings and plays several instruments. And himself.

He plays a saxophone two different ways.



He plays his buttons, his head and his butt.



His tail helps him play his teeth.



He plays a trombone and thrusts the slide at the audience in the theatre; early Disney sound cartoons always seem to have something coming at or coming away from the camera in a late ‘20s try at 3-D perspective.



The gag seems to be how many “funny” shapes the rubberised trombone can be made into. And there’s the old cartoon gag (I’m sure it was old in 1929, too) where someone blows into an instrument or a balloon or at birthday candles so hard, their body contracts to almost nothing.



All this happens to the background strains of the song “Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo,” co-written by Carl Stalling (who, I’m guessing, played the piano in this short) and making its film bow.

A Likely Story

One of my favourite pieces of Mike Maltese dialogue at Warner Bros. is when Daffy Duck starts accusing the butler in Daffy Dilly (1948), building and building his case through detective and mystery plot clichés.

Ken Harris’ gestures augment the words very nicely.



“Where were you the night of April the 16th?”
“I...I...”



“A likely story!”



“I see it all now.” Note how Daffy’s cogitating.



“You and the upstairs maid.” Daffy points toward the upstairs.



“ ‘Do the old boy in,’ you said.” Daffy gives a strangling motion.



“ ‘Elderberry wine and old lace,’ you said.” Daffy motions like he’s pouring wine.



“ ‘Then the quick getaway,’ you said.”

Daffy eventually gets to that great line: “But you weren’t smart enough, John. Alias Johnny. Alias Jack. Alias Jackie!” as Mel Blanc’s voice rises.

Phil Monroe, Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughan also animated this cartoon.

Radio's Tart Aftertaste

Bob and Ray spent a great deal of their career wandering in the towered canyons of the New York City radio wilderness, going from network to network, and station to station, as the industry evolved.

One of their stops was at CBS, where they broadcast for 15 minutes each weeknight starting June 30, 1959 until the following June 24th when the network fiddled with its evening programming and they looking for work again. That means they were no longer on the air when the Christian Science Monitor praised their CBS show in a story published June 28, 1960, an amusing twist in itself.

Despite what the column states, there were good portions of their CBS show which were not ad-libbed. A fellow named Phil Green was helping them with sketches. And the animated “Bob and Ray’s Hollywood Classics” never made it to air, despite Variety stating on March 30, 1960 a deal had been struck with California National Productions—an NBC company—to distribute it. Bob and Ray were in business with Ed Graham, who later produced the Linus the Lionhearted cartoon series.

The article mentions the WHDH shows in Boston which ended in July 1950 when the duo went to NBC. I enjoy parts of them but they’re quite different in tone than the 15-minuters in New York. With the shorter time slot, they couldn’t meander like they did on the Boston shows. On the other hand, I miss the musical interludes that CBS decided not use (perhaps for cost-savings) and you’d hear on the NBC 15-minute broadcasts. The CBS shows ridiculed Jack Paar, treating his humility as less than genuine, and the network’s own policy in the wake of the quiz show scandals to put disclaimers on shows in an attempt at transparency.

The Mild Acid of Bob and Ray
By Melvin Maddocks
New York
Slumped on their kitchen stools, the so-called “sick” comedians sit, half-contemptuously throwing darts at their audiences. At the other extreme, hopping like pogo sticks, the gagsters peddle their patter—fast-talking, slick, and a little too eager to please.
In between, range a mere handful of comics, neither barbed nor bland. Among these belong CBS Radio’s Bob and Ray.
Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding may best be described as kind-hearted satirists who would, one feels, honestly hate to see harm to come to the things they make fun of. Like most radio and television comedians, their humor is parochial. The prime target, in other words, is radio and television, not life.
They have spent a combined 41 years in the media. Down to the last pear-toned caress, they know the way of unctuous announcers. Not a cliché of soap operas, Boris Karloff-type mysteries, or space-fiction dramas has escaped them. They command equally the absurdities of the woman’s program hostess and the pretensions of the on-the-scene interviewer.
● ● ●
In a well-equipped scale of voices, extending from deep nasal to crackling falsetto, they take off these and other airwave stereotypes. Characteristically, their fictional personalities are self-important and solemnly obsessed by March-hare ambitions. But, on balance, the laughter they provoke is affectionate. As their brief sketches—three or four per 15-minute program—genially wander to improvised conclusions, Bob and Ray almost seem to deserve the fatal label, whimsy. But a tart aftertaste nearly always rescues them.
The two, after 14 years of togetherness, works without a script. The effect is a bit like jazz improvisation, with one following the other’s lead, then trying to top it. Transcribe the routines to paper and—again like a jazz solo—the whole flavor evaporates. Everything depends upon hesitation, inflection, and nuance.
The scene where Bob and Ray tape their broadcasts, two or three at a session, is as informal as the entertainment it produces. In a small parlor-sized studio the comedians sit at plain rectangular table. While Ray, the more ebullient one, rocks back and forth in his dangerously tipped chair, Bob quietly doodles as they record a broadcast. A sound man and a turntable man share the studio with them. Behind glass a producer-director, assistant director, and technical director watch. Ray works hard—and successfully—to make them all “break up.” He clowns just as eagerly for the messenger boy who drops into swap repartee during commercials or between “takes.”
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Behind their convincing air of casualness, Bob and Ray are craftsmen with a solid respect for comic tradition. Among their admirations: Stoopnagle and Bud, Laurel and Hardy, and Robert Benchley, traces of whose deceptively guileless style may be found in their own work.
As multiple-voice impersonators, Bob and Ray have never done as well in television as on radio. There is something dampening about the soprano of Mary Magoon, for example, emerging a little sheepishly from the burly person of Mr. Goulding. Now they think they have this handicap licked. The answer: animated cartoons. The comedians, who have also made a reputation in the industry for their commercials, own their private animation studio. At present, they are writing, producing, and acting in a cartoon series dealing in parodies of overworked movie plots, which they hope to sell next season.
Old Bob and Ray fans, who knew them back in Boston a dozen years ago and before they went “network,” natural swear they were at their sharpest in the early days. But in this latest project it may be taken for granted that Mr. Elliott and Mr. Goulding will still be operating on the theory upon which their reasonably literate, reasonable subtle humor is based: “There are no hicks anymore. They’re as hip in Sioux City as they are in New York.”